Junius is never more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as a railer.

The author of the _Present Discontents_ speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke of Grafton; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or their situation illustrates a principle.

Instead of reviling, he probes, he reflects, he warns; and as the result of this serious method, pursued by a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature.
The last great pamphlet in the history of English public affairs had been Swift's tract _On the Conduct of the Allies_ (1711), in which the writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date.

Swift's pamphlet is close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobody need read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of the Peace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the most insane of English wars.[1] There is not a sentence in it which does not belong exclusively to the matter in hand: not a line of that general wisdom which is for all time.

In the _Present Discontents_ the method is just the opposite of this.